Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen multiple organizations “internationalize,” either by adding international offices, or building partnerships with affiliates, or at least by adding members to their teams from Global South lands. Anyone have a reading list on how to maximize the effectiveness of those transitions? We’re aware of works like The Beauty of Partnership…
http://beautyofpartnership.org/
which is more of a skill/culture builder, but are there works written up for agencies and churches who want to internationalize their staffs and/or infrastructure? If you know of one and could point us that direction click “Comment” after the web version of this item. And thanks in advance for any help.
I offer workshops to mission agency leadership teams and to their Boards on how the globalization of missions has impacted the traditional western mission agency. The challenge is that most western agencies were developed when missions was “from the West to the rest”. To function effectively in global missions today requires that agencies become partnership friendly. The internationalization is one option that many agencies are taking in their adaptation to the new reality. But the primary challenge is that of becoming partnership friendly with missions now taking place in the “from anywhere to everywhere” paradigm. I am not aware of much that has been written on the big picture. There are studies and books written on the challenges of adapting to the new reality, challenges such as multicultural teams, team language, member care, partnership in sending/receiving, changing the economic engine, agency/local church relationship, etc. But here is one article I wrote for OMF that addresses the big picture: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_dIzlxotO6JczJqSy1UNjc0aVU/view?usp=sharing